You cannot walk up to the New York Stock Exchange and buy a share. Exchanges only deal with member firms, so every retail trade in existence routes through a broker. The broker takes your order, sends it on, holds the shares that come back and holds your cash the rest of the time.
That arrangement works, but everything about how you trade is downstream of it. The broker's hours are your hours. The broker's custody is your custody. The broker's account application, with its identity checks and linked bank account, is your front door. Trading without a broker means replacing each of those pieces. Here is how that works in practice.
What the broker is actually for
Strip away the app and a brokerage does three jobs. Access: it is a member of the exchange and you are not. Custody: it holds your cash and your shares, in its name, on your behalf. Settlement: when you sell, it handles the day-long dance of moving shares one way and money the other.
These jobs are real. The question is whether they need a middleman institution, or whether software can do them. For share ownership, the middleman is still mandatory. For price exposure, it no longer is.
The broker-free version
Based is not a broker, and that is the point. It is a self-custody wallet that connects you to Hyperliquid, a decentralised platform built for trading. Instead of shares, what trades there are perpetual futures. A perpetual future is a contract that tracks a stock's price. Buy it and you profit when the stock rises. Sell it short and you profit when it falls. You never own the share, so nothing needs to sit in a vault in your name.
Access works differently: the markets are open systems, so there is no membership and no gatekeeper. Custody works differently: your money stays in a self-custodial wallet, an app where only you hold the keys. Based never takes possession of your funds. Settlement works differently: trades clear on the network in seconds rather than through a next-day settlement cycle.
The practical result reads like a list of things missing. No account application. No approval delay. No linked bank account, since you fund the wallet with USDC, a dollar-pegged digital currency. No market hours either. The markets run 24/7, weekends included.
The honest trade-offs
No dividends and no voting rights, because you do not own shares. If your goal is holding a company for twenty years and collecting the payout, a traditional broker like Interactive Brokers does that job and Based does not.
Perpetual futures also carry a funding mechanism, small periodic payments between longs and shorts that keep the contract tracking the stock. Fees are flat and public, listed on the fees page. And leverage, which perps make available, cuts both ways. Positions carry liquidation risk: move far enough against one and it is closed automatically, with the margin behind it gone. Nobody reviews your suitability before you use it. You are the risk department. The perps guide covers how to manage this.
Self-custody itself is a responsibility. Only you hold your keys, which means no one can freeze your account, and also no one can reset your password. Write down the recovery phrase. We wrote a plain-language explainer on what self-custody actually means.
Who this is for
Traders, mostly. People reacting to earnings at 6pm, to news on a Sunday, to a move in NVDA or TSLA while the exchange is dark. People outside the US banking system who could never open a US brokerage account in the first place. And people who simply want their funds in their own hands between trades.
Browse every market on Based to see what is tradable right now.